Entry #49
I am winding down the year now with my blog posts for the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks blog challenge. I cannot finish the year without talking about my grandmother, Alma Maier Lindner.
Alma Maier
Alma Maier was the grandmother that I never knew – my mother’s mother. My mother barely knew her either, since she died when my mother was just two years old. The sad thing is that she died from sepsis as a complication of an impacted wisdom tooth. It is probable that antibiotics would have saved her life.
I learned not too long ago that her husband, Otto Lindner, was not with her when she died. He was visiting friends in Kentucky. I’m sure there must be a logical explanation for this, but it just sounds terribly sad. I never heard Grandpa talk about this. Grandpa, then, marred Effie Lucretia Daughters who was nine years older than him. Until I was about five, I had no idea that Effie was not my real grandmother. Certainly, she treated my sister and I with all of the love and affection that one would expect from a grandmother who was blood kin.
Alma Maier was the only daughter of Johann Georg Gottlob Maier and Juliana Magdalena Stephan. Born on 19 May 1893 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Alma, had two full brothers, Emil and Will (Week 5, Why Is My Uncle Wearing a Dress), and two half-brothers, Charlie and Phil Solger.
My impression of Alma is that she was a person of great sympathy. It seems that people shared things with her. My family has two very old Bibles that came to Alma from a minister who asked him to keep them for him. He never returned. This minister instructed her that the Bibles “were never to be sold.” Here we are nearly a century later, holding these Bibles. Alma is long gone and certainly the minister died years ago. What are we to do with the Bibles?
Alma was musical and she may have taken music lessons from Carl Valentin Wunderle, the German-born musician and composer. I have a postcard from Wunderle to Alma. It sounds as though he knows her and that it is not just a response to fan mail.
Note to Alma Maier from Carl Wunderle
The text reads:
Wertes Fräulein Alma: Haben Sie meine Stimme zu: “Erinnerung an Hohenaschau“? ich kann sie nirgends finden. Lassen Sie sich doch mal sehen bei uns. Hoffend daß Sie und Familie sich voll befinden mit besten Grüße. C. Wunderle
I think Wunderle is asking my grandmother if she has been able to find a copy of his recording “Remembering Hohenaschau,” because he has not.
Alma also received postcards from a man in the Azores, where her father occasionally traveled to work on machinery. I am not sure who this man was.
I asked my grandpa, Otto, how he met Alma. He told me that he had to speak to her father first before he could court her. My aunt told me a few weeks ago that her dad may have been able to see her mother from the back yard of his home – they were neighbors. She was not sure if they talked over the fence before the permission was given. She said that he may have been too shy to ask Alma out and so he went to Gottlob to pave the way. I supposed the courtship went well, because Alma and Otto were married on 22 May 1920. She and Otto were together only six years when she died on 11 August 1926.
Wedding of Alma Maier and Otto Lindner – 22 May 1920
I have quite a few photos of my grandmother. Some are in costume, which tells me she was a fun person.
Alma Maier – Is this a wig?
Alma reminds me a bit of my Aunt Sofie Maier, Alma’s first cousin. Of course, I only knew Aunt Sofie as an elderly matron. I always feel like I am looking at a woman with a warm personality whenever I look at my real grandmother – no disrespect to Effie, she was just a different kind of woman. It is a sad loss that I was never able to know her.